Olympus OM-D E-M1 II Hands On Preview

[Arlen]

Kevin, thanks for the preview of the E-M1 II. I'm looking forward to your full review. I'm particularly interested in the higher ISO noise performance, since more pixels have been added to the sensor. In that regard, could you also look at noise during long exposures? The E-M1, as good as it is, has been notoriously noisy at exposures longer than about 30 seconds. It can be alleviated by turning on LE noise reduction, but that requires it to perform a second black-frame exposure equal in length to the first. So a five minute exposure with noise reduction ties up the camera for ten minutes.

One other note concerning a point you made in the article about not being able to use auto ISO in manual mode. Unless the mark II has changed from the mark I (I hope not!), you can get auto ISO to work in manual mode by going into the menu under Cog E and changing ISO-Auto to All. The one drawback is that by default, you can't change exposure compensation under this configuration, since the front wheel switches to controlling aperture instead. I've seen reports that exposure comp (via ISO) can be reassigned to another button, but I haven't tried that.

[Kevin Raber]

Arlen,  The few tests I did 2045seconds I did use noise reduction and did have to do a black cal exposure.  That is no different though than most other cameras.  Frankly I though the files were a bit noisy but not as much as I expected for such concentration of pixels.  I'd much rather test it with various exposures and see what noise build up looks like with increased exposure and increased ISO.  The whole Auto ISO should not involve diving into menus like you suggest.  It can be done more gracefully and could easily be put as an option on the super menu.  Sames goes with locking dials and buttons.  It's these little things that trip up a cameras as nice as this one.  It really is a nice camera.

[Arlen]

Thanks, Kevin. I agree that other cameras also have increased noise with long exposures; and maybe most of them with pixel densities this high yield a similar result. But for full frame cameras--for instance my now aged Canon 5D--the LE noise is much lower; low enough that it can be handled satisfactorily in post processing. That's not the case for the E-M1.

And yes, you're right of course about the clunkiness of the E-M1 I (and II, apparently) handling of auto ISO in manual mode; no easy way for exposure compensation is a serious oversight.

[Camerajim]

If the new hi-res mode works as described, blurring the areas of movement to look like a long exposure, this could be an answer in many cases for not only increased resolution but also for noise reduction. The hi-res results I've had from a Pen F show little to no noise. I think this is moving from being a gimmick to becoming a truly useful tool.

This won't require a RAW processor to check, as the hi-res mode produces excellent 50mp jpegs.

[skirkp]

The HighRes samples on imaging-resource open in several raw file development tools already (e.g. AccuRaw) since they look just like the files from the Pen-F.  The raw files that I have looked at are less smoothed by noise reduction and seem preferable to the smaller 50 MPx JPGs.

scott